[斯科特]Square Enix 老板看到了电影、漫画、XR、AI 的价值并拥抱变革

《最终幻想 XVI》对于史克威尔艾尼克斯来说是一款大型游戏。

首先我祝大家新年快乐。

2023 年，人们的生活出现了好转，这要归功于新冠肺炎 (COVID-19) 疫情在肆虐了这么久之后已基本平息，并且取消了由此引发的限制。

与此同时，2023年也是动荡的一年，地缘政治风险加剧，通胀急剧上升，部分原因是各国央行为应对疫情而采取的货币政策举措。

各地区、国家，甚至我们个人都发现自己正处于一个转型时期，世界正在努力建立大流行后的“新常态”。

随着整个社会不确定性的增加，我们定位核心业务的数字娱乐领域也在发生变化。

2023 年，我们看到多个领域发布了引人注目的产品和服务，而新兴技术的商业化和采用似乎更加遥远。

这些产品的潜力也比以往任何时候都吸引了更多的关注。

例如，虽然扩展现实 (XR) 领域之前主要围绕元宇宙和其他虚拟空间的业务应用程序开发，但到 2023 年，许多将虚拟空间与现实世界融合的新服务兴起。

一个典型的例子是建筑行业，以前在其业务中对 XR 的集成有限，现在开始越来越多地采用这些技术，因为它们能够将现实世界的建筑结构转换为数据，这一过程也得益于广泛使用商用无人机。

在数字娱乐领域，重点是开拓新内容的开发，随着能够使用虚拟现实（VR）提供更加身临其境、更加真实的体验的设备上市，数字内容本身的体验价值急剧增加。 ）和增强现实（AR）。

下一步将是将这些技术应用于融合现实和虚拟世界的新内容形式。

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential implications had for some time largely been subjects of academic debate. However, the introduction of ChatGPT, which allows anyone to easily produce writing or translations or to engage in text-based dialogue, sparked the rapid spread of generative AIs. Its release made it apparent that the applicability of generative AI was by no means limited to text, and the subsequent months saw a quick succession of launches of new services and content that expanded generative AI into a variety of domains with close ties to digital entertainment, including images, video, and music. I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.

As such, 2023 was a year of numerous innovations in the realm of digital entertainment. It was also a milestone year for the SQUARE ENIX GROUP in that we both celebrated our 20th anniversary and also set forth on a new path under the management team that I head.

Since assuming the roles of president and representative director of Square Enix Holdings in June 2023, I have worked to reassess our entire Group. Customers, shareholders, investors, employees, and other stakeholders have generously shared their time and insights on numerous occasions to help me do so. These insights have assisted me in identifying the direction we should take to achieve further growth and in beginning to lay the groundwork to make that a reality.

In our Digital Entertainment business, we are working to strengthen both our content development and publishing capabilities.

On the content development side, we are working not only to vet our existing pipeline of titles under development, but also to put the capabilities in place to ensure that development efforts that have yet to begin result in products and services that meet the expectations of our customers more than ever before. Specifically, we have begun optimizing our resource allocation across our entire development chain in order to accelerate an effort that was already underway to strengthen our internal development capabilities. We are also expanding knowledge sharing with the goal of standardizing our processes and enhancing our efficiency.

On the publishing side, which consists of our sales and marketing functions, we are working to enable greater global collaboration and to promote the shift to digital. By sharing information within our Group on the features unique to different geographical markets and on the best practices for addressing them, we are bolstering our publishing capabilities globally. We see this as an effective means not only to maximize our sales of new titles, but also to deliver our rich back catalog to more customers and in turn to expand the fan base for our Group’s intellectual properties (IPs).

We are also working to put organizational structures in place that will enable closer collaboration between our content development and publishing functions. Our goal is to strike a balance between a product-oriented and a market-oriented approach so that we are able to share customer views with our content development team and thereby create content that makes our customers even happier than ever before.

We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions. In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts. In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.

With a focus on comics, our publication business provides content spanning a wide range of genres in both digital and printed formats. Our amusement business meanwhile provides real-world entertainment, primarily through its Taito Station amusement facilities. Both businesses enable us to reach broad customer segments beyond those that engage with our digital entertainment business, thus bolstering awareness of our group. They help us to convey the appeal of our content in a more mult